50 Years Later, MIT Looks Back At AI and Networking Pioneer Project MAC 50
v3rgEz (125380) writes "Fifty years ago, a major project that ultimately seeded much of today's computer technology was created at MIT: Project MAC, and the Multics operating system initiative within the project. Daniel Dern interviews some of the key figures involved in the pioneering project, looking at how one laboratory helped spawn Ethernet, AI, and dozens of tech companies and other innovations that took ideas from the lab to the personal computer."
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Yes, I'm lampooning the simplified world-view of the space fanbois. Computing, electronics and technology in general are complex subjects, and many, many kinds of people worked on many kinds of technologies for many reasons, even in countries without a manned space program. Imagine that.
The people that absurdly oversimplify history into NASA=technology deserve as much "lambasting" as my keyboard allows (and /.'s stupid 10 posts a day AC limit.)
And if a knowledge of history is a mental illness, then stop the
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Knowledge of history isn't a sign of mental illness at all, but an overwhelming urge to make others read your views on history even in discussions of another subject might be. The Slashdot submission did not claim any link between this technology and the space race, and the comments section could not have either since yours was the first post.
So, the other commenter's comparison of you to APK is apt. You are not educating anyone here on history, you are only making others concerned about your sanity.
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It is the handle of a quite a prolific poster here. You can recognize his posts quite easily because of the lengths and massive amount of links.
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Biz saw no need for computers at first. Market of six, etc. Govt drove the industry with orders during the 50s and 60s. NASA was like 4% of GDP and represented a big part of the orders. Conservative short-sighted biz would have been content to wait for centuries before responding to a pure market signal for miniturization. So yes, NASA played a large role.
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Was quite happy making typewriters. Have you shown evidence that they were working on miniaturizing without government involvement. I think there were many factors involved in the technological advancements of the past 1/2 century or so and the space race (militarization and ICBMs included) did play a large role in that. Would we have gotten there without it? Probably. Would we have gotten there quicker or even as quickly? Probably not.
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IBM happily took orders from the Nazi govt.
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Machine Aided Computation.
It's the typical Cambridge (Mass) conceit that if it doesn't happened within 50 miles of Kendall Square (or Harvard Square, depending on your persuasion) it doesn't count, and if it does, you should know about it.
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Youtube has many films from the era.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Mr Corbato himself.
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Multics was amazing for its time. Then Honeywell took it on as a commercial product and didn't know how to sell it, or more like their sales people were clueless and didn't want it competing against their own home-grown crappy operating system and hardware. So Multics died.
In the minicomputer era, Prime Computers (a competitor to DEC) built an operating system that they called a "mini" Multics, because it used the same security ring idea, but it wasn't a tenth as good.
And I do myself remember Project MA
Multics is not Unix.... (Score:3)
Unix is not Multics (thus the name) and that is really all you need to know about Multics (except that a generation of MIT hackers cut their teeth in figuring out how to hack it).
You are Really a wanker (Score:1)
Oh GOSH it would be BLASPHEMY to QUESTION how OTHERS DO IT
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Multics implemented a single level store for data access, discarding the clear distinction between files (called segments in Multics) and process memory. The memory of a process consisted solely of segments which were mapped into its address space. To read or write to them, the process simply used normal CPU instructions, and the operating system took care of making sure that all the modifications were saved to disk. In POSIX terminology, it was a
Re:Multics is not Unix.... (Score:4, Informative)
Unix is not Multics and that is really all you need to know about Multics
There are many interesting aspects about Multics that deserve to be heard about if not studied. To name a few: the second-dimension access system or protection rings [wikipedia.org] via "ring brackets" that allowed a 'r', 'w' or 'x' access to a "segment"/file depending on the caller (user or daemon) own "running ring". Thus, a lower (higher privilege) ring program would extend its r&|x access via brackets to allow a user to enter that program (a "gate"). For instance the continuums [multicians.org] (now forums) were usually running in ring 3, while a simple user was in 4 (the core system was in 0). Multics had also convenient and powerful ACL [multicians.org], accesses provided to user/group-project/login-mode. Using long names or short names for a file(segment)... Studying a bit of Multics helps to realize that most of OSes concepts were already invented ~50 years ago...
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Once you've been in computers long enough you realize that every 20 years the cycle repeats. From VMs, Thin Client, Fat Client, UI redesigns, etc.
The only thing that hasn't change is that Artificial Ignorance (A.I.) is still a complete and total joke.
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That is not intelligence; that is just a computer following a scripted set of instructions. There is no self awareness. No ability to haven an original thought / idea. To ask "What if?" or to ask "Why?"
Another /. poster already pointed this out, and one I completely agree with:
"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald,
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Proof that reading Ayn Rand can literally ruin people.
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Minsky's problem is that he just writes, doesn't program his ideas, which are a pretty good start: i.e., a society of minds or independent programs with different domains. The programs should communicate with each other and with the user through natural language, instead of arbitrary programmer-defined protocols.
I'm a (minor) Multician (Score:2)
My truename appears in the list of "Multicians". I still have my copy of The Design of the Multics Operating System.
One of the things that Multics did better than anything since was a feature called dynamic linking. In Multics, linking to a DLL was done via a symbolic reference resolved at runtime, rather than a reference to an ordinal (as in Windows). The Multics file system allowed you to have multiple names on the same file. The combination of those two features resulted in the ability to hot-plug